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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Brexit and the independent substance of populism

The level of bitterness contained in the following two interrogatory sentences rather jolts the unwary reader:

But what then happens to the cultural-political strands that seem, with apologies to the good consciences of socialist and liberal Leavers, such reliable markers of Leave sentiment? Unquestioning patriotism, nativism, belief in white British supremacy, fear of Muslims, bring-backery, the search for traitors, faith privileged over evidence, ersatz imperial nostalgia, exaggerated expectations of familial favours from the white rulers of ex-colonies, climate change scepticism, the yearning for a return to the gender and racial stereotypes of forty years ago, the belief that ‘civil servant’ and ‘corrupt, meddling bureaucrat’ are synonyms, the glorification of the British military?

There is something marvelous in that cavalcade of insinuation.

For context, the writer proposes to his readers the repudiation of Brexit, or some quiet, papered-over vitiation of it; but to his credit, he immediately recognizes that one cannot merely wave away a majority of the electorate of the United Kingdom. That would be ill-advised.

Nevertheless, right now Remainers scheme to win the election they lost, essentially by means of an imposture of democracy.

Now, I grant that it may be unwise to present to the undifferentiated electorate, in the form of a gigantic plebiscite composed of an up-or-down vote, questions of grave national urgency; but once presented, it is doubly unwise to thwart that decision by underhanded means, thus usurping the decision-making role that the plebiscite was designed to embody.

Parliamentary maneuvers to falsify and obstruct stated majority will are rather unlikely candidates for endearing oneself to the majority. London plutocrats intrigue with the broader Left against the voters of the UK, in order to overturn an election. Some in the broader Left feel pangs of guilt about that, so it is necessary to show that the voters of the UK had it coming.

Thus the cavalcade of insinuation quoted above. The subtext is “we believe in democracy; but these unrighteous Brits aren’t deserving of it.” It comes early in an essay on Brexit by the reporter and novelist James Meek in the Leftist London Review of Books.

But despite the ill-will of the cavalcade, I submit that the essay itself rewards an attentive read. In fact, as Meek gradually propounds his full argument, the ill-will diminishes, the insinuations mostly fade away, and a far more accurate and even warm portrait of the “reliable markers of Leave sentiment” emerges. The bulk of Mr. Meek’s essay amounts to a profile of the Euroskeptic Tory politician Jacob Rees-Moog. Despite a number of insinuations similar to the cavalcade, it’s an engaging profile, perspicacious in both its analysis of his previous career in finance and his more recent political ascent to the Cabinet. But the great virtue of the essay lies in its grudging awareness that something new is happening, something unpredicted and predictable.

For you see, Mr. Meek, being a good European Leftist, cannot help but notice the shifting class structures at work here. He’s too honest to omit that, to apply American vernacular, the bitter-clingers in this drama include the remnants of the old English proletariat. He might even secretly allow that their defiance of London capital, on this grave matter of political economy, is surely something that Marx would admire. Thus he concedes, in a particularly pregnant passage: “that there’s a powerful, socially conservative, defensively patriotic constituency out there that might put, for instance, a redundant industrial worker and a landed aristocrat in the same camp for causes other than Europe.” Indeed it might. With sufficient adjustments for national character, the same phenomenon is observable all over the world. A political coalition of cultural Right and economic Left “has acquired independent substance.”

Bankers and financiers everywhere despise it. Sophisticated neocons sneer. University provosts tremble for their countries. In Britain, it paralyzes the Marxist Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour Party; while discomfiting the capitalists who thought they ran the modern Tory Party. In America, it exposes the entire Upper Midwest to GOP predation, making life hell for moderate Democrats who imagined they were on the verge of a permanent majority; while simultaneously reanimating the old trust-busting Republican spirit for action against Silicon Valley. In Europe, it has elevated into governing coalitions formerly fringe parties led by charismatic nationalists who only gain in proletarian popularity as they defy elite platitudes. In short, this “independent substance” is in the midst of realigning Western politics.

While the word Trump does not appear in Meek’s essay, the contrast between British and American populism in its own way demonstrates the durability of the independent substance. It suggests that vulgarity, half-literate bluster and obsessive tweetstorms may be incidental, not foundational. Populism may prove broad enough, in political terms, to compass insult-comics and urbane aristocrats alike. Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson may have little in common socially, but they both have achieved enormous success as dissenters from elite orthodoxies and defenders of popular causes; such that they are probably two of the first names that come to mind in that context.

It’s all very interesting. Anyone who’s confident he knows what will happen next, probably has something shady to sell you.

Comments (5)

That's quite a large cavalcade of obnoxious characters and traits to trot out for his (presumably sympathetic leftish) readers. Perhaps he missed one or two symptoms of neanderthalism, but he got so many that it hardly matters.

While the rest of the article might appear to be somewhat neutral about the neanderthals he loathes, his caveat before the cavalcade gives the game away:

But what then happens to the cultural-political strands that seem, with apologies to the good consciences of socialist and liberal Leavers, such reliable markers of Leave sentiment?

Effectively, he is saying that the socialist and liberal Leavers aren't like this, but the rest of them are. Gone are the days that liberals can think of centrists and moderates in the opposition party - or even moderates IN THEIR OWN PARTY - as reasonable men who are merely slightly misled or misinformed. They have succumbed to the disease that was always sitting in their principles (had they but known it) that cannot tolerate TRUE diversity of opinion on such matters. It is hardly plausible, for example, that the quite definitely left-of-moderate-liberal (in 1960) Hubert Humphrey would willingly accept the designation "searches for traitors" as implying being a neanderthal, given that he proposed putting communists in concentration camps in 1950, or that he wouldn't have been upset at the changes to gender stereotypes in the last 40 years, or would have had no objections to allowing Muslim immigrants to invoke sharia law. No, those who are not far, far leftwards (e.g. socialists) come in for targeting with all those accusations of neanderthalism.

The subtext is “we believe in democracy; but these unrighteous Brits aren’t deserving of it.”

Right. In the new liberalism, (which is the old liberalism with the make-up removed), non-liberals who do such stupid things as hesitate to allow whole towns in Britain to become subject to sharia law do not deserve to have their desires registered, because they obviously can't begin to understand reality: we have to render their votes null since (like children) they don't know what's good for them. Because, in the long run, being non-(far-out) liberal is just a form of being insane, anyway.

One can hope that the rabid left will eventually come to view so many component parts of the population as "the enemy" and antagonize them, that they become politically irrelevant. But as long as they hold the media and academia, they will not go quietly into the night. Something must be done to dislodge their complete control of colleges, since they continue to form the 1/3 most educated portion of the population, turning them into ever farther left automatons. Perhaps the "independent substance" of populism can take on the fight.

~~A political coalition of cultural Right and economic Left “has acquired independent substance.”~~

It's no secret that the broader Left has largely moved away from concern with class issues in favor of identity politics. But in C. Lasch biographer Eric Miller's view, the class-concern aspect of the New Left of the 60's eventually found something of a home in the agrarian/localist/populist circle of which Wendell Berry's writing has been a sort of hub or "meeting place," a hub to which certain groups and individuals on the cultural Right are also attached.

This would include such groups as the Front Porch Republic, Dreher's "Benedict Option," and the American Solidarity Party, while on the Left it seems to attract socialists and old-style "New Deal" liberals who find identity politics troubling.

Thus in a sense the "new liberalism" is the "old liberalism with the makeup removed," as Tony puts it, but that's not the whole story. There are some "old" liberals who think that many aspects of the new liberalism are problematic. Unfortunately you don't hear from them much, at least so far.

That's quite a large cavalcade of obnoxious characters and traits to trot out for his (presumably sympathetic leftish) readers. Perhaps he missed one or two symptoms of neanderthalism, but he got so many that it hardly matters.

"Bring-backery" is probably my favorite.

There are some "old" liberals who think that many aspects of the new liberalism are problematic. Unfortunately you don't hear from them much, at least so far.

NiceM, I suspect that there is some really problematic equivocation and identification problems going on under the surface here. For example, there are not-a-few blacks who regularly vote Democrat who, when you examine their actual beliefs, are actually far more conservative than they are liberal. Not completely separately, there are at least a few liberals who never really understood the implications of the principles of liberalism, and only ever really agreed with a (significant) number of policy prescriptions of liberals in, say, 1960 or whenever. They are then shocked at the outflowing of liberalism that is found now in the far left of identity politics, because they never really grasped that liberalism is based on underlying principles that make it impossible to deny such identity politics. It may be a bit of semantic controversy to demand that the new liberalism is merely the inescapable logical conclusion of Lockean liberalism, but given that men 60 years ago started predicting this, I don't think it is all that much "mere semantics". This implies that those liberals who now are repulsed by what has become of the liberal leading edge are ripe for the plucking for conservatism, because they never really cottoned to the principled views that liberalism is based on.

I think that is correct, Tony, provided we take into account the effect of the Marcusean New Left on 60's liberalism, some of whose followers embraced it while others did not. I think that what we're seeing now is in part a playing out of that dynamic, and not simply the devolution of the old liberalism into identity politics. It's notable that many old-style leftists have no time whatsoever for so-called "Cultural Marxism," seeing it as a largely heterodox outgrowth of "true" leftism, due to the fact it has little or no interest in class issues. Today's liberal-leftism or progressivism is an odd duck of a thing: a species of liberalism that has managed to get 60's cultural leftism into its ideological DNA, and is now manifesting the worst aspects of both.

I certainly believe that in the long run liberalism of the Lockean variety is self-defeating. But I'm not sure that's entirely what we're seeing now (although I do think that its seeming inability to resist identity politics is strong evidence of its weakness).

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